Legal Managed Services and a corruption trial defense

The journey from project to partnership: How LPO services helped a global law firm mount a high-profile corruption trial defense

When a top New York litigation powerhouse was mounting a white-collar criminal defense in a high-profile federal corruption case, the firm needed additional resources to handle the intense volumes of big data. They turned to LPO services from Thomson Reuters. What began as a relatively straightforward document review project for the team grew into a unique partnership with a global law firm that extended through the conclusion of trial.

Rising to the challenge

Legal Managed Services, formerly Pangea3, began with an issue coding review on a large set of electronic documents, but no one could anticipate the extent to which the LPO service engagement would ultimately grow. From issue categorization, the scope of work quickly expanded to running complex, real-time fact-finding searches on a 12 million document dataset, witness preparation, chronology creation, the mapping of facts and issues, all the way to on-site trial support.

Relying on legal outsourcing expertise and extensive document review experience, Legal Managed Services conducted substantive document review across a set of over 650,000 documents across multiple document databases. The team communicated its findings by compiling reports, authoring fact memoranda, and populating a case map database.

Finally, when the matter went to trial, Legal Managed Services supported the client by serving as the first point of attack for document fact research, both in person with the trial team on-site and remotely with 24-hour follow-the-sun coverage from India. Combining innovation and technology with tried-and-true review workflows, the high-value contributions made by Legal Managed Services enabled the attorneys to focus their energies on the legal representation of their client.

A deeper dive into the LPO services

Starting from issue coding

The client turned to Legal Managed Services to help develop a substantive, fact-based defense strategy. Assistant Vice President Edward Sohn, a U.S.-trained litigator, oversaw the project, while a Senior Manager, an Indian lawyer with extensive e-discovery experience, supervised the team and managed the project. Given the complexity of the subject matter and the enormity of the data, Legal Managed Services staffed over 30 of the brightest Indian attorneys for first-line review and internal quality control. At the outset of the project, they worked with the attorneys to create an issue-spotting review protocol, a process frequently employed for clients.

Our work on this matter vaulted us into unprecedented territory in the legal services industry. The expertise at Legal Managed Services, the confidence of our law firm client to continually challenge us, and the complexity of this high-stakes case created a golden opportunity to test and advance the upper boundaries of our capabilities. Because of this experience, we are eager to drive higher-value solutions to the benefit of both our law firm and corporate clients.

As the initial stages of structured review completed, counsel began sending requests for more targeted searches. These searches were complicated by the introduction of an additional production database containing cumbersome and unstructured data.

Counsel increasingly relied on Legal Managed Services to navigate both the existing and the supplemental database. Because of this highly integrated team, Legal Managed Services anticipated the needs of counsel, resulting in charts and chronologies tailored to help counsel get to the heart of the fact analysis.

Organizing and managing the facts of the case

The law firm had initiated its own case fact management process from the outset of its engagement, but a case mapping solution is only as good as its maintenance and updates. This level of maintenance requires both fact expertise and substantial time and energy, and most of the time these tools are underutilized or fall by the wayside.

Legal Managed Services, utilizing its technical and substantive expertise, took lead responsibility for organizing, populating, and updating the client's case management database so that it effectively linked facts about people, issues, events, and documents. This maximized the solution for improved case assessment and trial readiness. Legal Managed Services also ensured its prior reports and summaries were incorporated into the case management database, resulting in an up-to-date, trial-ready comprehensive knowledge warehouse.

24-hour trial support

Once the trial began, the two project leads, Vice President Edward Sohn and the India-based Senior Manager flew to the U.S from New Delhi, and along with a NY-based Associate Director of Litigation, joined the trial team in New York. With personnel on-site and a 30-attorney team working remotely in India, the Legal Managed Services provided 24-hour support to continue meeting the needs of the client from the law firm's Manhattan offices, the war room, the courtroom, or the other side of the world.

When trial began, counsel relied on this real-time coverage to have Legal Managed Services locate documentary evidence and research responding to the testimony of prosecution witnesses. This evidence provided the underlying documentary support for outlines used during cross-examination. Legal Managed Services also took an all-of-the-above approach to client support, whether it was an extra hand on deck for handling paper documents, tracking exhibits admitted at trial, or even emergency legal research on procedural issues under short time constraints. They operated as a true extension of the legal team and allowed the attorneys to focus more on their legal practice.

My team had to review and make sense of millions and millions of emails, invoices, and other miscellaneous documents spread over multiple databases. This could have eaten up all our time and resources. Trying to stay lean, we retained Legal Managed Services. Their team did a great job and my associates would hire them again.

Attorney at Am Law Global 100 firm

Conclusion

The seasoned Legal Managed Services team provided effective 24/7 support and coverage in document review, both during trial preparation and throughout the trial. As an integral part of the defense team, they delivered under tight deadlines and provided litigation support that freed the law firm client to focus more fully on the substantive issues at trial. The Am Law Global 100 client benefited not only from access to the Legal Managed Services comprehensive suite of highly efficient litigation LPO services, but from a cost savings of close to 90% over in-house or temporary staffing resources.

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